Eric Covener’s Journal

I was debugging a perl script that invoked lots of external commands and checked return codes along the way. Somewhere in the course of debugging, I decided it would be a good idea to dump the output of one of the subcommands to a file.

I appended 2>1 | tee log to the command invocation, because this is a pattern I use in a terminal for running a very similar script (whose progress I want to track but still be able to get at it in a file).

But, when you add to the pipeline instead of just redirecting with the regular operators, you actually clobber the return code of the entire pipeline.

Compare:

false; echo $?

vs.

false | tee log; echo $?

vs.

false > log; echo $?

This can happen if autoconf decides to use the wrong pre-processor while testing for what headers you have installed (AC_CHECK_HEADER). Each header test will fail, so when it comes to testing for actual featrures, the feature tests will fail b/c the proper headers won’t be included.

On Solaris 10 (amd64), run configure with CPP=”cc -E” so /lib/cpp isn’t found. /lib/cpp can’t handle some of the system headers that are ultimately included.

Contrary to popular belief, this error message does not always mean your z/Linux system hasn’t detected any z/VM crypto coprocessors. Even when you see this logged when laoding z90crypt, you should still be able to access your crypto card slot. If you can’t, turn your focus away from z90crypt and back towards things like pkcsslotd.

I accepted an invitation to join the Apache HTTPD Project Management Committee (PMC)

http://www.apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html#structure

PMC member is a developer or a committer that was elected due to merit for the evolution of the project and demonstration of commitment. They have write access to the code repository, an apache.org mail address, the right to vote for the community-related decisions and the right to propose an active user for committership. The PMC as a whole is the entity that controls the project, nobody else.

And the fork already addresses one of my pet-peeves:

An option to set the size of the buddy icons displayed in the chat window.

funpidgin++!

I saw a system today where one lonely RHEL4 package had been installed, and it caused a conflict during 5.0->5.1 upgrade that ultimately “hid” the kernel package.

The last two messages in yum upgrade

–> Processing Conflict: kernel conflicts e2fsprogs < 1.37-4
Error: No Package Matching kernel.ppc64

rpm -q e2fsprogs showed a .EL4 version of the package, lucked out in resolving it!

RoadRunner seems to have setup some crap to return the address of their search engine for invalid DNS lookups — unfortunately my resolver config is a little involved at home and _relies_ on a failure for address like ‘foo.bar’.

Somehow, opting out of their redirector service in their search engine page almost immediately changed the behavior of their DNS servers.

When you have firefox running locally, and then try to run a remote one, it does some horrendous thing under the covers and opens a new tab in your local browser (running on the same system as the X server instead of where you launched it)

You can suppress that default behavior by invoking your remote firefox as below:

MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1 firefox -P